by Zach Selekman

An urgent plea echoed among residents of the Makhmur refugee camp in northern Iraq with whom CPT met recently, “We just want peace.”  The United Nations established the camp in 1998 to provide refuge to the family members and relatives of the PKK who lived in the Kurdish villages of southeastern Turkey.  Outside of the building in which team members met with the families, there was a statue of a woman carrying a baby.  When CPTers asked about the statue’s meaning, people told us, “They died while fleeing from the Turkish army.  We tried to stay in six places before Makhmur.  It was winter and many people froze, dying on the way.”

CPT Iraq team members met with nearly thirty family members of the camp’s October 2009 peace delegation, which had crossed from Iraq into Turkey as a good faith gesture toward the Turkish government, after the government had declared the “Kurdish issue” more open for discussion.  After at least one million people welcomed the twenty-six-member delegation, along with eight PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) members, back to the Kurdish region of southeastern Turkey, the Turkish authorities detained them, put them under surveillance after releasing them, and then sentenced each of them to fifteen years imprisonment.  The family members CPTers spoke to were of all ages, male and female, and everyone who wanted to speak received the opportunity.

“We knew that they might be arrested or killed,” one young man told us, whose father is a member of the peace delegation.  An older man, who had tears in his eyes said, “We are tired of Turkey’s war against us.”  One woman said, “Is it too much to ask for our basic human rights?”

Among the charges against the members of the peace delegation are “spreading propaganda for an illegal organization” and “praising crime and criminals.”  In a related case, Mayor Selim Sadak of Siirt, a city in southeastern Turkey, was recently sentenced to twenty-two months in jail for using the term “Kurdistan” when speaking to a journalist, an act that earned him the charge of “spreading propaganda for the PKK” [See story here.]

In February of this year, lawyer Ibrahim Bilmez quoted his client Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the PKK, at the “6th International Conference on the EU, Turkey and the Kurds,” saying, “What we aimed for with the arrival of the Peace Groups was to show that despite all their suffering, the Kurds were ready for peace…  This was disregarded.  The State has no respectability here.  There is a war and humans are dying.  Statesmen need to prepare for peace like they prepare for war.”